Read Chekhov for a Better 2014

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New Year’s resolutions tend toward self-improvement. This is the year you will start going to the gym, or finally kick caffeine, or nip in the bud your nascent addiction to cronuts. Maybe you have promised to watch less television, or you have fiendishly reasoned that self-improvement relies on watching more television: you still don’t know what happened at the Red Wedding or who Walter White is, and this is making it hard for you to connect with your fellow human beings.

But what if you’re interested in connecting with your fellow human beings in a way that doesn’t require access to premium cable? According to a study published in October in the journal Science, reading literary fiction — including the works of Anton Chekhov — increases scores on tests of empathy and emotional intelligence. Who wouldn’t want to be more empathetic in 2014?

But before embarking on a self-help tour of late-Czarist Russia, be advised that Chekhov doesn’t provide easy answers to becoming a kinder, more caring person. There’s no five-step solution, no short prayer that will increase your fortunes and lay waste to the fields of your enemies.

Instead, he brings us into a world where bad things often happen — and for that world, there’s no better Baedeker than Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’sStories of Anton Chekhov. “Sleepy” tells of a young orphan tending a baby whose crying prevents her from ever sleeping; the girl solves this problem by smothering the baby. In “Anyuta,” a callous medical student draws charcoal lines on the emaciated body of his “roommate” — the poor seamstress Anyuta — to help him study for an anatomy exam; they both know that as soon as he graduates, their relationship will end and he will marry a more respectable spouse. And “In the Ravine” features Aksinya, a woman who pours boiling water on her sister-in-law’s infant son (the baby dies, Aksinya keeps control of the family-owned brickworks, and the bereaved sister-in-law descends into poverty).

Chekhov doesn’t make us better people by restoring our faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity or by charming us with the bright hope of a happy ending. In fact, he makes it hard for us to make snap judgments about heroes and villains. Varka, the girl in “Sleepy,” has witnessed the deaths of both parents, she works for a family that abuses her, she is exhausted to the point of hallucination, and her awful crime arises from a primal desire for one moment of peaceful slumber. Aksinya, also guilty of infanticide, acts when her father-in-law declares that her nephew will one day inherit his business — a business which the child’s father has almost ruined, and which Aksinya has devoted her life to saving. None of this excuses their actions, but Chekhov forces us to understand these characters before we can quickly write them off as monsters, as evil-doers.

Chekhov isn’t interested in something as flat and simple as evil. Time and again in his work, he draws a link between indifference — the failure of empathy — and cruelty. When terrible things happen in a Chekhov story, it isn’t because one of the characters is a bad seed. It is often because of the characters’ inability to extend to each other the kind of compassion that would force them outside of their own concerns.

It’s worth noting that Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf, his father was a hyper-religious tyrant, and he knew from the time he was in his twenties that tuberculosis would cut his life short (he died at 44). He didn’t believe in God or the reward of a joyous afterlife, and yet his stories affirm in ways large and small that the only hope we have lies in our relationships with other people. If the world is hell, it’s because we make it that way; if we are to be happy, it’s only by connecting with the people around us.

In Chekhov’s last play, “The Cherry Orchard,” — bracingly translated by Michael Henry Heim in Chekhov: The Essential Plays — the young idealist Trofimov lectures his one-time patroness Lyubov Andreevna about her failings in love and money: she is a spendthrift whose estate is about to be auctioned; she has driven herself into debt for the love of a ne’er-do-well. Her response, a scorching indictment of Trofimov’s easy dismissal of all that she has suffered in life, climaxes with this demand: “Show a little generosity!”

Lyubov Andreevna is speaking to Trofimov; Chekhov is speaking to us. This writer who sought objectivity in all of his work and who was blasted by his contemporaries for being apolitical and amoral, condenses into this line a plea to us all. That before we judge, we understand. That we extend to each other the same compassion that we all seek.

Resolutions are notoriously hard to keep. Gyms are full of people in better shape than you. Cronuts are tasty. Television is hard to kick. And the benefits of caffeine — among them wakefulness and the will to live — are obvious. But with a little help from Chekhov, perhaps 2014 can be the year that we all show a little generosity.

Brendan Mathews
’s stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories 2010, Virginia Quarterly Review, Five Chapters, PORT Magazine, and other magazines in the US and UK. He teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass. Follow him on Twitter @mathews_with1t.

If Holden’s anger derives not just from petty vendettas against his prep school classmates but as a terrifying glimpse into a world of pervasive abuse and indifference, then maybe Holden isn’t so whiny after all. Maybe he’s right.

I’ve always been curious about being in a band. The camaraderie, the conflict, the unwashed glamour, and the power of performance have eternally fascinated me. My brief, aborted attempts at bandom, fortunately, never made it out of the practice room. My guitar skills were mediocre, my singing voice was not even remotely dynamic, and my attempts at songwriting were self-conscious and stiff. I realized that making music with others—music that people actually want to listen to—requires an almost masochistic inclination to give control over to something larger happening in a room with the people you’re making music with. Not everyone has the power or inclination to give over to something like that—and to do it in public, repeatedly. Sadly, I’m not possessed of that inclination. I am, however, unable to stop thinking about it. What could it have been like if I’d been a little better, a little braver, a little more tenacious?

If I couldn’t be a guitarist, I decided to write a novel about one—someone overcoming the obstacles to performance, someone giving herself over to the thing in the room. Part of my journey writing the book involved an investigation into the lives of women who made it work. Reading about these women seemed natural at the time—research, since I was writing this book about a girl in a band. But it would be dishonest to say there wasn’t more to it, that I wasn’t constantly analyzing a missed opportunity.

When I first left home, I shared the lurid curiosity of any teenage New York City transplant about Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, and The Sex Pistols. The intensity of their relationship, the glamour of their international affair, even the drugs, all of it seemed mythic and tantalizingly bold. I only knew Nancy as a part of Sid—this wild, irresponsible American shoving her way into the world of the most famous band in the U.K.–kind of like a punk rock Wallis Simpson. I knew that their love was, well, vicious, and that it ended in Nancy’s murder at the Chelsea Hotel in the room she and Sid shared. I knew Nancy from photos, where she glared into the camera with smoky eyes. There was something fascinating about her in these images—a girl who seemed simultaneously fierce and wrecked.

I was delighted when Nancy and Sid popped up in Clothes, Music, Boys, and in Reckless. These books revealed flashes of the kinds of people Sid and Nancy were—grotesque, endearing, fucking crazy. But Albertine’s recollections of Sid are also poignant and intimate—she beautifully translates for us the shorthand of her own relationship with Sid, one that should seem familiar to many: that brief, daily, sexually-charged-but-celibate intimacy of a young adult friendship. Most moving is Albertine’s sharing of a letter Sid wrote her from jail, when she tells us his handwriting is childish, the i’s dotted with little circles. Her recollections of Nancy are surprising in that they are equally fond—the fondest portrayal of Nancy I’ve seen anywhere.

Hynde’s memoir includes an account of Nancy that does not disappoint, one that seems a more familiar fit in existing Spungen folklore. Hynde’s recollection features Nancy’s repeated, violent demands for a cream-cheese bagel. Hynde makes Nancy sound difficult, shrill, and effective. Still, Hynde is not cruel in this portrayal. Rather, she is earnest, waving an accurate snapshot of those times. Sid, a friend so friendly he offered to marry Hynde for U.K. citizenship, appears all over the place—I’m not sure how he was so ever-present considering the briefness of his life, but he is. He plays a role for many of these women; Viv’s bestie, Hynde’s prospective fiancé, Deborah’s daughter’s killer.

Brownstein’s rock memoir, which takes place later, contains no Sid and Nancy anecdotes, but it is one of profound and palpable loneliness. The event she describes with the most emotional heft is the death of a beloved pet. There is a sincere loss here, and the depth of sadness we feel for Brownstein grows sharper due to its ordinary, near-mildness on the tragedy scale. Brownstein attempts to distract us in Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl with the scrim of her cleverness. In these distractions, she makes herself known to us, her readers and fans, as if to say “Keep watching.” There is something else there, something more important, between this loneliness and these Eddie Vedder anecdotes. I wondered if Nancy’s self-destructive and sensational behavior was also a scrim of some kind. What would we have seen if we’d had the opportunity to keep watching?

The aim of each of these women, perhaps of every artist, is a longing to be understood, to make some seemingly unknowable part of the self known. In varying degrees, the women telling these stories have achieved that—all but Nancy Spungen. Perhaps this is a result of Nancy ousted from the place of storyteller. Nancy was never able to achieve any sort of understanding as an artist, despite her desire to do so. Her mother, Deborah, explains how music-mad her daughter was, and how she’d call from Europe when she first began living there to tell her family that she’d been recruited into a French girl band. “But,” Deborah tells Nancy (and us) “you don’t even play an instrument.”

Nancy’s mother Deborah’s contempt and frustration are palpable throughout her book, but perhaps they are at their peak in her dismissal of her daughter’s musical ambition; what can you possibly be thinking? You can’t do something like this. This isn’t you. The wild irony here is that Sid Vicious was also wholly unable to play an instrument, yet rocketed to fame as a musician, was and arguably still is, the face of an entire music movement. Maybe it’s unsurprising that Sid seems to be the only one who ever understood Nancy, and the fierceness of their attachment—described by Albertine and Hynde, too—seems almost necessary.

It’s startling that even Nancy’s mother sees her, in retrospect, as the foil to something or someone else. We all know her only in relation to Sid, as his victim and provocateur. I kept wondering, what would Nancy’s story be, about her relationship with an artist, about those dreams of being an artist herself? I wondered if it would be anything like Kim Gordon’s story, an artistic life that was so often reactive—performance as a lashing out against her abusive brother, a foil for her ex-husband Thurston Moore, a source of contrast—the lone girl in the band. Even though Kim lived and Nancy didn’t, were they somehow alike? Thrashing out to be heard in response to—or in conversation with—something forceful and immutable?

The most upsetting portion of Deborah’s account of her daughter’s life is her description of Nancy’s funeral arrangements. That image of Nancy, the shock of white-blonde hair, the heavy eye make-up and torn stockings, the way we all picture her, well, that’s how she looked when she died. Deborah was so convinced that this was not the real Nancy, not the “chestnut” haired Nancy she’d known. Deborah had the mortician dye Nancy’s glorious, uber-blonde hair back to brown. Instead of allowing her daughter the dignity of her final choice about her body to override whatever was going on in her own heart and in the hearts of her family, Mrs. Spungen hired a man to dye the hair on her daughter’s corpse. This depth of misunderstanding among her own family, the indignity of her final appearance in this world, was, for me, the most painful moment in my reading of these often heartrending stories.

Ultimately, I believe it is the fear of this kind of colossal misunderstanding that brought all of these women into the practice room, and out of it. Certainly stranger and perhaps less reckless accounts could have been set before us, but I think they would all lead to a similar conclusion. And really, that’s all we’re looking for, as people reading about artists. What makes them work? How do they wrangle and manage their power? And are they just like us, or are they much, much more?

1. Having recently regained dry land after four weeks adrift in the first thousand pages of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s pelagic six-volume My Struggle (only to find myself confronted with a note-strewn desk and two large books bristling with the polychromic sticky tabs it now occurs to me I might have wanted to devise a reasonably consistent system for deploying), I’m troubled by the sense that if there’s ever been a literary project best left to speak for itself, My Struggle might be it. It’s also likely that the many liberties its author takes — with conventional narrative structure, with any readily discernible logic dictating some passages’ tortuous paths of thought, with grammatical norms, and even with the ordinarily sacrosanct writer’s mandate to eschew cliché — have overwhelmed the sector of my brain that transacts in sentences, paragraphs, rhetorical touch, and so forth, to the extent that I’m in for my own considerable struggle here as I try to transform the notes I scribbled down with seeming indiscrimination in several different notebooks, Book 2’s margins, on Post-its and the back of a gas bill that it looks like still needs to be paid into an orderly account of what it’s like to read Knausgaard. Nevertheless, some thoughts:

The first thing I should emphasize is that I found myself consumed by My Struggle, swallowed whole in a way that recalled for me the experience of reading similarly mammoth works like Moby-Dick, JR, Crime and Punishment,The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 2666 — Big Books that temporarily assume an autocrat’s control over their readers’ inner lives. And then since my ostensible focus here is Book Two: A Man in Love, I should also single out for praise this second volume while conceding that it’s in many ways merely an amplification of the first, and that this is both a merit and demerit. Which is to say that if you found yourself unable to put Book One down even during some of its most water-treadingly indulgent-seeming passages of plotless drift precisely because you were compelled by the minutiae of Knausgaard’s “struggle,” then you will find a lot to keep you reading through A Man In Love’s near-600 pages. If, on the other hand, you found the former book frequently irritating, disagreed with its author’s aggressive indifference to poetic niceties; if you considered it an unconscionably navel-gazing sprawl, the dull and the mundane speciously elevated to metaphysical heights the actual text rarely managed to reach…you may not make it through Book Two.

I’m in the former camp: read both books hungrily and find myself already missing Knausgaard just a few days after turning A Man in Love’s last page, searching the Web for inexpensive crash courses in Norwegian, mostly just wishing Volume Three were available in English now. (At roughly five hundred pages per installment, the last four are presumably intruding nightly on heroic translator Don Bartlett’s sleep). Some readers will be put off by the prospect of a prose work of Proustian length written in sentences that lack Proust’s style, elegance, and grace; I, too, had a hard time with some of the silly all-caps interjections (“FUCK, SHIT, FUCK!”) along with the frequent, blithe lapses into rank cliché — “The time was ripe,” “It was now or never,” “She was clearly cut from the same cloth as me,” and so on. The writing is purportedly ungainly in its original Norwegian, too. And yet the coarse phrasing serves Knausgaard’s overarching purpose oddly well. While there’s very little polish at phrase-level, sentences are syntactically complex — circuitous, recursive, serpentine in the way bar-stool disquisitions on points of intense personal interest can be — and if consistently guilty of the serial-comma-splice, then also a reflection of the almost desperate speed with which Knausgaard seems determined to track every insight, notion, thought-line, argument, reflection through the labyrinthine warrens of whatever burrowing creature’s hole it’s drawn him down.

Here he is, for instance, having just returned with his nursery-school-age daughter from a classmate’s birthday party:
I returned the glass to the table and stubbed out my cigarette. There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared. This was a role in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me. It wasn’t that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them, on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn’t actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something that could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not. Between these two perspectives there was no halfway point. There was just the small, self-effacing one and the large, distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

What was the problem?
On the other hand, it would be unfair if the ratio of thought to action here left readers with the false impression that this is a 573-page book in which nothing happens. In passages that volley back and forth through time we see young Karl Ove decamp for Stockholm; sever ties with almost all of his old life in Norway, (which program includes leaving his first wife); fall in love again; remarry; fight to sustain (and then, once it’s begun to slip away, recover) the elation of those first few months of courtship as the new couple settles into everyday routine; witness his second wife Linda’s pregnancy and the subsequent birth of their first daughter; give listless interviews and lectures on his books and ambivalence towards literary fame; discourse with friends and enemies on being, art, morality — but the sections I liked best, the ones that make the books worth reading, retreat from these episodes and trek into the underground of consciousness, where Knausgaard’s unchecked and frequently volatile reflections are no longer bound by the normative limits of decent speech and behavior in respectable company.

2.
Some of these sentences and paragraphs are long, but they operate in a way very much unlike those of some other writers one tends to class as either maximalist or longwinded, depending on one’s feelings about length in prose: Thomas Bernhard, David Foster Wallace, or László Krasznahorkai. Bernhard’s read almost like parodies of manic, rabid, raving thought — they are very much internal monologues. And while they are unhinged at times, what seems like madness is really an insane deference to logic: a logic that will pursue the necessary consequences of first premises far beyond the boundaries of bourgeois comfort, into the truth that lies beneath and must be left to lie there unlooked-at if life will be lived, if family, colleagues, social circles are to be engaged — basically, if anything is to be done.

Bernhard, like Beckett, is in this way very funny. His narrators’ better tirades follow their merciless logic to conclusions that are shocking or at least discomfiting not only because we can’t believe somebody’s saying this, but because of the disquieting sense that they might actually be true. Here is a representative passage from Concrete, in the midst of a mostly book-spanning “digression” from the narrator’s stated purpose, which is to write a definitive study of composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy:
My preparations have now been going on for years, for more than a decade, as I have said. Perhaps, it occurs to me, I ought not to have interrupted them by doing other things, perhaps I shouldn’t have begun anything on Schonberg or Reger, or even contemplated the Nietzsche sketch: all these diversions, instead of preparing me for Mendelssohn, simply took me further and further from him. […] All these attempts […] had basically been merely distractions from my main subject; moreover, they had all been failures, a fact which could only weaken my morale. It’s a good thing I destroyed them all […] But I’ve always had a sound instinct about what should be published and what should not, having always believed that publishing is senseless, if not an intellectual crime, or rather a capital offence against the intellect. […] Had I published my essay on Schonberg I shouldn’t dare to be seen in the street any longer; the same would be true if I’d published my work on Nietzsche, although that was not a complete failure. To publish anything is folly and evidence of a certain defect of character. […] And what about my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy? […] Naturally I intend to publish it, whatever the consequences. For I actually believe that this work will be my most successful, or rather my least unsuccessful. I certainly am thinking of publishing it! But before I can publish it I have to write it, I thought, and at this thought I burst into a fit of laughter, of what I call self-laughter, to which I have become prone over the years through being constantly alone.
The reason Concrete’s narrator can’t begin the monumental work to which he has devoted this phase of his life is that he foresees, correctly, that no matter how far he manages to go itwon’t be far enough. Anything he writes will fall short of his vision, and while this insight is common enough to be a cliché, it’s a cliché that the artist who aspires to make art has to disregard if he’s ever to make anything. In other words, the productive artist necessarily suppresses his integrity, proceeds as if it weren’t true that anything he ultimately brings into the world will be, beside its incorporeal Platonic vision, a disappointment. What’s simultaneously terrifying and hilarious in Bernhard is his narrators’ integrity, their refusal to compromise, to deceive themselves or allow themselves to be deceived into acceptance of the subtle deviations from the truth that are what enable us to go about our lives.

Meanwhile, Krasznahorkai’s long sentences read to me much more like speech transcribed: musings, sermons, lectures, disquisitions, diatribes, and, above all, stories. They’re less internal than Bernhard’s; even when tracing a character’s unspoken thoughts they’re more like a figure talking to himself than a lunatic frantically looping along Bernhardian nightmare theme park rides, hurtling towards madness and death. Here, the former composer who has not only retired from creative life but sealed himself off from the depressed Hungarian small town in which The Melancholy of Resistance takes place has had (while hammering nails) a Saul-of-Tarsus-style revelation:
It was indeed a sudden awakening, but, like all such awakenings, not wholly unheralded, for before he set out on his tour he had been aware only of the plainly laughable nature of his efforts, the chief of which was to prevent his left hand being battered to pieces, a piffling task to which he applied the whole might of his considerable intellect [that] […]laughable as it was, […] [intimated that] there was a deeper, more complex issue at stake, the nature of which was to allow him to master the art of banging in nails. He recalled various stages in his frantic efforts and the fact that even then […] he had suspected that any eventual resolution would not be due entirely to taking rational thought in the matter, a suspicion that had in the meantime become a certainty, for […]this apparently insignificant task had been resolved by a […] flexible attitude to permutations, the passage from ‘missing the point’ to ‘hitting the nail on the head’ so to speak, owing nothing, absolutely nothing, to concentrated logic and everything to improvisation […]

He had arrived at the decisive moment of resignation, the happy little glimmer on the head of the nail conjured nothing more or less than a mysterious, unforgettable sensation that had surprised him on his way home, that despite the apparently insufferable condition of the town, he was glad simply to be alive […]
Knausgaard, in contrast with Krasznahorkai and Bernhard, neither transposes creative-impotence-induced nerve-trauma nor conjures weirdly dialectic soliloquies. Instead, the image his prose—and even his subject—frequently calls to this reader’s mind is an author bent over his keypad, typing at very high-gear velocity:
I began to work, sat in my new office on Dalagatan writing every day while Linda was at home with Vanja and came to see me for lunch, often worried about something but also happy, she was closer to the child and what was happening than me, for I was writing what had started out as a long essay [but] slowly but surely was growing into a novel, it soon reached a point where it was everything and writing was all I did, I moved into the office, wrote day and night, sleeping an hour here and there. I was filled with an absolutely fantastic feeling, a kind of light burnt within me, not hot and consuming but cold and clear and shining. At night I took a cup of coffee with me and sat down on the bench outside the hospital to smoke, the streets around me were quiet, and I could hardly sit still, so great was my happiness. Everything was possible. Everything made sense.
Knausgaard’s purpose in My Struggle, explicit in its title, is to simultaneously depict, scrutinize and enact the process of writing the very work that narrates the story of its author writing himself through and ultimately out of his consuming need to write. It’s an impressive trick. If Bernhard’s books are often long uninhibited screeds “about” inhibited artists and writers, then Knausgaard’s first two volumes are “about” a man’s struggle to surmount the mundane impediments to his being present at his desk, feverishly cataloguing and endlessly carping about these same impediments to his being there. The most substantial narrative arc in these two volumes traces the composition of the memoir as it’s being composed — which means, since by default nearly every non-writing activity, obligation, interaction, and relationship constitutes a kind of roadblock in this composition’s path, antagonists abound:
A few weeks after the novel was finished life began as a house husband, and the plan was it would last until next spring while Linda did the last year of her training at the Dramatiska Institutet. The novel writing had taken its toll on our relationship, I slept in the office for six weeks, barely seeing Linda and our five-month-old daughter, and when at last it was over she was relieved and happy, and I owed it to her to be there, not just in the same room, physically, but also with all my attention and participation. I couldn’t do it. For several months I felt a sorrow at not being where I had been, in the cold, clear environment, and my yearning to return was stronger than my pleasure at the life we lived. The fact that the novel was doing well didn’t matter. After every good review I put a cross in the book and waited for the next, after every conversation with the agent at the publisher’s when a foreign company had shown some interest or made an offer, I put a cross in the book and waited for the next, and I wasn’t very interested when it was eventually nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, for if there was one thing I had learned over the last six months it was that what all writing was about was writing.

3.
It’s true that if this were all Knausgaard had to offer his readers, few would be inclined to indulge him for 3,000 pages (and furthermore provokes contemplation of how, for instance, a 3,000-page counter-memoir composed by Linda about her struggle to put up with her husband’s duty-shirking on the home front during their matrimony’s embryonic phase might read); but intricately textured, almost Altman-like social episodes compel a mesmeric attention that’s at times tough to account for rationally. At birthday parties, literary conferences, a christening, a funeral, in bookstores, flats, supermarkets, bars, a restless Knausgaard interacts with the whole rolling cast of people intimately or peripherally involved in his professional and private life. Much of the readerly fun to be found in these transcriptions of the interpersonal mundane inheres in the persistent dissonance between Knausgaard’s mild outward manner and the frank, often punishing perlustrations to which he subsequently subjects both his interlocutors and himself. An interview that on the surface seems to come off fairly well gets angrily dismissed as ersatz-High Culture fluff — vapid onanism Knausgaard validates by placidly agreeing to take part:
The problem is what surrounds all these authorships, the flattery that mediocre writers thrive on and, as a consequence of their false self-image, everything they are emboldened to say to the press and TV.

I know what I’m talking about. I’m one of them myself.

Oh, I could cut off my head with the bitterness and shame that I have allowed myself to be lured, not just once but time after time. If I have learned one thing over these years, which seems to me immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with such mediocrity, it is the following:

Don’t believe you are anybody.

Do not fucking believe you are somebody.

Because you are not. You’re just a smug, mediocre little shit.

Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t. You’re just a little shit.

So keep your head down and work, you little shit. Then at least, you’ll get something out of it. Shut your mouth, keep your head down, work and know that you’re not worth a shit.
I also found it difficult to part ways with many characters. Knausgaard’s daughters, in particular, benefit from the filterless, unembellished presentation, probably because small children tend to do amusing, irritating, infuriating, and endearing things. Meanwhile, his friend and confidante, Geir, an academic equipped with copious wit and opinion, gets many of the book’s most entertaining lines, but also often makes both Knausgaard and the reader pause to think. Here he is with Karl Ove, Geir first:
“I think it’s Sigurd Slembe. The time to act. To act or not to act. It’s classic Hamlet. To be an actor in your own life or a spectator.”

“And you are?”

“Good question.”

A silence arose. Then he said:

“I’m probably a spectator, with elements of choreographed action. But I don’t really know. I think there’s a lot inside me that I can’t see. And so it doesn’t exist. And you?”

“Spectator.”

“But you’re here. And yesterday you were in Bergen.”

“Yes. But this is not the result of any decision. It was forced.”

“That’s perhaps another way of making a decision, hm? Letting whatever happens do it for you?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s strange,” he said. “The more unreflective you are, the more active you are. You know, the boxers I wrote about had an incredible presence. But that meant they weren’t spectators of themselves, so they didn’t remember anything. Not a thing! Share the moment with me here and now. That was their offer. And of course that works for them, they always have to enter the ring again, and if you’ve been given a pounding in the previous fight it’s best if you don’t remember it too well, otherwise you’ve had it. But their presence was absolutely amazing. It filled everything. Vita contemplativa or vita activa, I supposed they’re the two forms, aren’t they? It’s an old problem, of course. Besets all spectators. But not actors. It’s a typical spectator problem . . .”

Behind us, Christina stuck her head through the door.

“Would you two like some coffee?”

“Please,” I said.Book One’s critical event — the death of Knausgaard’s father — serves as a backdrop for the real story: Knausgaard’s breakthrough decision to build the first volume of his memoir around it; similarly, the less harrowing but no less felt drama of his grudging entrée into love and domestic life anchors A Man in Love’s story of a man fighting to reconcile that love with his almost inhuman artistic designs.

No surprise that not all of the individuals who came across versions of themselves in these pages were pleased with their portrayals. (The threat of legal action on the part of certain relatives resulted in Knausgaard and his Norwegian publisher agreeing to change a few names.) But in light of Knausgaard’s overall intent, they’re probably depicted accurately — not as a Dickensian cast of characters acting out one grandly shared humanist drama but rather as figures who on occasion drop by to complicate Knausgaard’s ongoing struggle to write something great. These aren’t quite people in the ordinary sense but a near-endless series of person-shaped impressions — shadows flitting across the beam of the author’s incandescently projected vision. If anyone is conscious of just how cold this frequently can make him seem, it’s certainly Knausgaard himself, who throughout both volumes lapses into long handwringing fits of self-loathing and -condemnation, agonized by his sense that he’s letting down everyone he ought to love.

4.
I call this sometimes-sociopathic-seeming tendency to reduce in their representation real people to sources of personal annoyance “accurate” because, with astounding single-mindedness (or monomania, if you prefer), Knausgaard conceives of and then executes the writing project that both consumes him and sequesters him from life. He’s Ahab, only with the final volume’s publication — which reportedly concludes with whatever the Norwegian is for “I am no longer an author” — he’s gone and caught the whale.

One interpretation of a literary quest to kill its own author might be that it’s perverse: in seeking to extinguish the artistic impulse, the author aims to annihilate not only the ambition that has driven him throughout his adult life, but an identity built up and burnished over decades. If Knausgaard is no longer an author, what is he? What will he be?

And then, from a career-lensed perspective, killing the whale is suicide. I’ve often wondered whether Wallace unintentionally terminated the novelist in himself with Infinite Jest; certainly the title of his final short-fiction collection, as well as that volume’s persistently bleak takes on the value of an individual’s drive to achieve anything, suggests a despair of ever returning from the wasteland that a book of near precedent-less critical approbation can exile its author to: after you’ve done it, what are you supposed to do? Just as Joyce could not in the ‘30s send Bloom off on another Dublin tour, so Wallace’s next novel couldn’t be I.J. Redux.

On the other hand, few, if any, authors aspiring to compose literary art that I know of start out with the intent to make anything less than what they privately conceive of as an as-yet-unshaped, but inchoate and most importantly possible Perfect Book. This is the reason they decide to write. Reality — in the form of family life, financial circumstance, the tundra of the market, self-assurance eroded by critique or, probably worse, indifference, failure, doubt, exhaustion, time — eventually intervenes. Very few people, whether they would admit as much or not, particularly in the first inferno of ambitious burn, are willing to go down with the whale. Poverty, obscurity, irrelevance, low social standing, and so forth all seem more romantic, less intolerable, more like the plot of some young person’s adventure tale, less like the despondence-inducing signatures of failure and a wasted life at eighteen than they do when you find yourself approaching middle age.

In William Gaddis’sJR,another massive meditation on ambition, art, and time, an aging, alcoholic, seemingly doomed writer is perpetually haunted by visions of windows closing, chances slipping away or already long lost to time. Since finishing my own first book, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to chart a course forward, or at least get started on some sort of new project, but have been mostly stymied by a sense that I’m just not sure what I really want to do next. I’m so much more alert to the discouraging reality that no matter what I wind up doing, committing to that work will entail an implicit decision not to try my hand at any number of other things. Granting that this might not strike your average global citizen as an existential concern on the order of the triumph of Capital, rising sea, and inequality levels, to say nothing of the looming rise of the machines, it matters to me — because I only get the handful of decades I’ve already blown through a few of, and the passage of time doesn’t seem to be bringing with it a corresponding surge in my vitality, so that the issue isn’t only that I can’t decide what kind of book I’d like to write, don’t even know how I’d like to write, I’m sick of my own sentences these days, and then I don’t know whether I should focus mainly on telling a story of sorts, and if so do I have any stories worth telling, and in this era of scattered insular intellectual and aesthetic camps, what kind of reader do I want to engage, and most of all what kind of work can I see myself committing to for the however many years it will take to complete — I can’t imagine even starting something new unless the need to carry it home takes hold of me with such force that I can’t not be working on it….

And the maybe-obvious Knausgaard link here is with the man’s sheer desperation — a desperation to emerge from all of this: the torpor, muddled thinking, indecision, and self-loathing; terror of more windows closing, fear of failure, envy, ambition so smothering it chokes off all but the most frantic exertions of will to open up the word-processing program and for Christ’s sakes just begin, the solipsism I recognized too well and have only really ever slipped free from, somewhat paradoxically, when hard at work, when the gaze is abruptly turned outward, and I’m able to see people again, see with them — perceive, if only fleetingly, that each has her own struggle, just as I do mine…in other words break out of the self’s airless solitary confinement: creative immersion as a kind of efflorescent opening out to the world at large.

My Struggle provides the reader with a portrait of an artist whose sometimes-quixotic-seeming-endeavor to narrate his struggles with life and art in their entirety consumes, possesses, captivates him, in that last verb’s literal sense, and thereby sets him free. When Knausgaard tells his wife he must leave her at home to care for their recently born daughter, mustwrite; when he won’t compromise even after she threatens to leave him, take the kid with her, then does; and when he furthermore dispenses with every last aesthetic consideration aside from this scribomaniacal need to write, he is both chronicling and dramatizing his own refusal to abandon the pursuit…and it’s this monstrously intact integrity with which he undertakes and then completes his masterwork that answers any question about the madness of a project that, like a rocket fired straight up into the sky, takes aim at its creator and terminates in the obliteration of his authorship, his hunger to create. It’s Knausgaard’s consummation, a triumph that emancipates the husband, father, son, and friend: the author is dead, leaving what’s left of the man free to walk away from his leviathan — preserved forever now in art’s time-cheating formaldehyde — freed from the echo chamber of thwarted intent, in order to emerge, maybe for the first time, into life.

Reading Chad Harbach’s 2010 essay “MFA vs. NYC” today one feels keenly the four years that have elapsed since it first appeared in the magazine he co-founded, n+1. At the start of 2010, the iPad did not exist and Borders did. By that year, degree-granting creative writing programs had proliferated from just 79 in 1976 to 1,269, while New York publishing, struck by the double-blow of e-books and the 2008 financial crisis, was bleeding jobs at a frightening pace. In 2010, both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award went to books published by tiny independent presses, and neither Paul Harding’sTinkers, which won the Pulitzer after being published by the nonprofit Bellevue Literary Press, nor Jaimy Gordon’sLord of Misrule, which took the NBA after being published by the one-man operation McPherson & Company, had been reviewed by the New York Times before they won their awards.

So even back then it was a bit of an understatement to suggest, as Harbach did in his n+1 essay, that “the university now rivals, if it hasn’t already surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world.” Today, though, when Harbach’s piece has resurfaced as the title essay of a new collection, MFA vs. NYC, it would be hard to find many writers who still believe, as Harbach maintains, that New York publishing and university creative writing programs remain “two complementary systems of roughly matched strength.” Put it this way: if you have kids and want to keep writing, would you aim for a teaching job in an MFA program or try your luck as a freelance writer in NYC? Thought so.

Perhaps this fundamental disconnect between the balance implied by its title and the economic realities of literary life circa 2014 explains the underthrob of panic that courses through a number of the essays in the new collection by writers outside the orbit of Planet MFA. Harbach, who edited this new volume, has tapped his stable of n+1 writers, a fair number of whom, like him, went to Harvard and earned six-figure advances for their first books. Whatever is ailing these folks, it isn’t lack of chutzpah or unwillingness to do what it takes to succeed, and yet what was clearly intended as a series of artsy-smartsy essays examining the state of play in literary America too often comes off as an extended moan of self-pity from a once-cosseted corner of Brownstone Brooklyn.

Harbach himself, whose 2011 novel Art of Fielding has done very well, is not among the moaners. Aside from the reprinted title essay and a perfunctory editor’s introduction, he mostly keeps his head down here. Not so his n+1 co-editor Keith Gessen, and Gessen’s longtime girlfriend Emily Gould, whose essays together form the emotional heart of the collection.

Gessen contributes a pair of linked essays, “Money (2006)” and “Money (2014),” which as their titles suggest, offer a before-and-after portrait of Gessen’s struggle to make a living as a NYC writer. The first, originally published in n+1 two years before the release of Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men, reads as a snarling, embittered defense of intellectual defensiveness. “Bad magazines,” he writes, “vulgarize your ideas and literally spray your pages with perfume.” Prestigious magazines are even worse, working writers so hard with “style editing, copyediting, query editing, [and] bulletproofing” that a freelancer soon realized he has “landed a $6-an-hour job, featuring heavy lifting.”

But this journalistic wage slavery is bliss compared to university teaching, which, Gessen reports, “buys the writer off with patronage, even as it destroys the fundamental preconditions for his being.” And don’t get him started on the tortures associated with publishing a book. Authors, he relates, must “spend every day prostituting themselves: with photographs, interviews, readings with accordions, live blogs on Amazon.com.” And get this: publishing companies are in business and want writers’ books to sell! To the public! For money!

Gessen redeems himself somewhat in his second essay, an account of his decision to risk destruction of “the fundamental preconditions of his being” and spend a semester teaching creative writing after the money from his book and his journalism runs out. He is blunt in his disdain for the teaching of creative writing, but as he describes his reasoning, it becomes clear that what he fears most is getting stuck in a room full of younger, grasping versions of himself:
In fact what I most wanted was to be told, by a writer, that I was myself a writer, that I had it. And so by teaching such a class, weren’t you also taking part in that deception, in the deception that all these students might become writers? And weren’t you also forced, all the time, to lie to them, in effect, whether mildly or baldly, about their work?
After driving away a quarter of his students after the first class, Gessen finds that it’s more complicated than that. Yes, his students’ egos can be fragile, and not all of them are great writers, but if he listens, if he responds to what they’ve actually written, they improve. “I even began to feel, in a way I’d never felt as a student, that the old saw about how you can’t teaching writing was possibly untrue,” he writes.

The narrative arc from “Money (2006)” to “Money (2014)” is essentially a happy one, but in the bigger picture of the economics of literary culture, the lesson is hardly uplifting. Gessen did everything a young NYC author could possibly do to succeed. He went to Harvard. He helped start a small but influential literary magazine. He served a year as staff book reviewer for New York magazine. He published a first novel that earned him a six-figure advance. Yet despite continuing to write for New York’s glossiest magazines, only a few years after his novel came out, Gessen couldn’t afford repairs on his car and had a rent check bounce. And what did he do? He did what all American writers do these days when they need money: he got with the program.

If the moral of this story is not sufficiently plain, Gessen need only glance across the breakfast table at Emily Gould, whose essay “Into the Woods” offers a poignant cautionary tale for those who fail to see the writing on the wall. Gould first came to public attention as a blogger at Gawker.com where she famously posted a picture of herself in a bathing suit on a Brooklyn rooftop giving the camera the finger. New York publishing appears to have mistaken interest in the bathing suit for interest in her prose style, and in 2008 she sold a memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever, to Simon and Schuster for $200,000.

Gould says it began to dawn on her that all wasn’t well when a young marketing assistant suggested that Gould, who had sold the book in part because of her compulsive online oversharing, start a blog. Sensing her handlers had no idea how to frame her public persona, she suggested they position her as the next voice of her generation. “They looked at me like I’d emitted a long, loud, smelly fart,” she reports. “And so – swear to god – I amended what I’d said: ‘Okay, say I’m a voice of my generation.’”

When the book tanked, Gould found herself emotionally and creatively paralyzed. “[B]y summer 2012 I was broke, and in debt, and it was no one’s fault but mine,” she writes. “Besides a couple of freelance writing assignments, my only source of income for more than a year had come from teaching yoga, for which I got paid $40 a class. In 2011 I made $7,000.”

It is, I grant you, a touch grating to be asked to feel sorry for a college-educated woman from the leafy Maryland suburbs whose pain at not being anointed the voice of her generation was so debilitating that she was forced to teach yoga classes for forty bucks an hour. Indeed, though the tale ends on an upbeat note with the sale of Gould’s debut novel, Friendship, due out in July, there is more than enough Schadenfreude piled up in Gould’s essay to satisfy even the most bitter of Brooklyn wannabe authors. But in the great scheme of things, Gould’s story should give pause to Brooklyn wannabes and anyone else who cares about American literature in the post-print age.

For one brief shining moment, roughly from the end of World War II to the late 1960s, print truly was king. King Print, whose Art Deco palaces once dotted Midtown Manhattan, owed its reign to a fleeting, historically anomalous period between the creation of print technologies that made newspapers, magazines, and paperback books cheap and easy to distribute and the innovations in television production that rendered those print advances obsolete. King Print limped along, a wounded but still powerful despot until the late 1990s when the Great Dragon Internet slew it once and for all.

The reign of King Print gave us not only great magazines like the New Yorker and newspapers like the New York Times, both of which soared in the postwar years, but also the work of writers as varied as Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, all of whom made a good living nearly exclusively from writing. But as we look back at this period we need to keep two very important things in mind. First, outside that one period, no one but hacks and geniuses really made money writing books, and most of the time even the hacks and the geniuses ended up poor. Second, were it not for the advent of the MFA system as a jobs program for midlist authors, we could be back in the 1850s, when serious writers either lived off their families like Henry Thoreau and Emily Dickinson or retreated into government sinecures like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

It is odd, especially for a group of writers like the n+1 set, who pride themselves on their intellectualism and historical insight, that their book on the subject mostly elides this essential historical explanation for the personal predicaments besetting members of their own tribe. MFA vs. NYC is prodigious in its effort to drill down into the sedimentary layers of Planet MFA. In one essay, Eric Bennett tells a fascinating, if somewhat conspiracy-minded tale of how Paul Engle, an early director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, took money and intellectual succor from the CIA to help build the program into the academic juggernaut it is today. In another, an excerpt from a 1988 essay, the late David Foster Wallace, in his early High Peevish period, catalogs the reasons why writing programs are creatively deadening. Even Gordon Lish, now best known for having hacked Raymond Carver’s early stories to bits nearly forty years ago, is trotted out in an essay by n+1 editor Carla Blumenkranz, despite the fact that Lish never lasted in the academy and taught instead in private, cult-like evening sessions held in people’s homes.

Meanwhile, aside from one or two backward glances, the book’s discussion of Planet NYC is relentlessly first-person present tense. In addition to pieces from writers like Gessen and Gould, Harbach includes essays by literary agents, publicists, and editors all chirpily describing their work and career paths. The industry pieces are smart and informative – agent Jim Rutman’s “The Disappointment Business” is especially good – but they feel shoehorned in from a very different book designed to give fledgling writers a behind-the-scenes tour of New York publishing.

All this adds up to a curious meta-narrative that weaves unspoken through this otherwise disjointed collection of essays: that half a century ago the university-industrial complex, perhaps aided by the CIA, tunneled underneath New York publishing and blew the thing sky high, sapping its ability to pay its writers and sending the likes of Gessen and Gould out into the wastelands of Brooklyn in search of freelance gigs and rent money. But this ignores the obvious, actual reason why MFA programs are winning the hearts and minds of today’s authors. Universities remain profit centers because, for now at least, they are analog. Students will pay thousands of dollars a year for a seat in a MFA program because it is a real seat in a real room taught by a real professor, who can be paid decently for his or her work. Harness that to a generation increasingly delaying committing to marriage and a career and you have a fairly powerful economic engine.

Want to know what’s ailing New York publishing? That’s it, in a nutshell. Why would anyone pay full price for this book when its authors, many of them complaining about how hard it is to make money from writing, are giving away their work for free online? The answer is obvious. By and large, people won’t. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said.

But can serious writing survive in such an atmosphere? I would argue that the authors of MFA vs. NYC, perhaps inadvertently, are showing the way. After all, my caveats notwithstanding, these are serious essays and people will read them, probably more so now that they are online than if they had appeared exclusively in print. The problem is, obviously, that if you give something away, it’s devilishly hard to get paid good money for it, which means that authors will have to look for alternative sources of revenue. Which, as Keith Gessen seems to have already discovered, means getting with the program.